A political and legal war is coming over President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to punish places like Los Angeles city and county that don’t cooperate with immigration authorities seeking to deport people in the country illegally.

After years of clamoring by local state Sen. Ed Hernandez for a Sacramento audit of the clearly sketchy fiscal practices of the city of Irwindale, the results are finally in: Not good, but apparently not actively criminal.

PCC trustees and press Thanks to Larry Wilson for covering the Pasadena City College Board of Trustees’ proposed by-law 2771, which would prevent our elected PCC trustees from speaking out to the media.

Is China going green, or is it merely pretending to? In his Dec. 4 commentary, “California: The Republic of Climate,” Joel Kotkin asserted that the Chinese government will make “gestures” regarding moving to green energy production but “will continue to add coal-fired plants to power their job-sapping export industries.

President-elect Donald Trump’s negotiated deal with the Carrier heating, air-conditioning and refrigeration company to keep hundreds of manufacturing jobs in Indiana, altering the company’s prior plan to move those jobs to Mexico, may have been a brilliant political move, but it does not bode well for free markets and the principle of equal treatment under the law.

While Donald Trump’s deal with the Carrier is getting all the headlines, closer to home, California has proved itself to be fond of these types of targeted tax incentives as well. From Hollywood to the aerospace industry, California has been quick to offer taxpayer-backed incentives to companies that threaten to leave.

At its headwaters in the hills of the northwestern San Fernando Valley, it is nothing more than a trickle in the rocks — just like any other river, anywhere. In some of its reaches, past the Hansen Dam, the reeds grow so high and the banks so swampy, so positively Mesopotamian, that people want to camp and fish there — just like any other river.

On a quiet Sunday morning 75 years ago Wednesday, the Japanese navy launched a devastating attack against the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. It was a day that would “live in infamy,” said President Franklin Roosevelt.

The California Legislature opened a new session Dec. 5 with Democrats holding more than two-thirds of the seats in both the state Senate and Assembly after an election that defied the national trend toward Republicans.

When more than 70 percent of voters said “yes” to Measure M in November, many may have been influenced by the first 10 words of the ballot language describing it: “Los Angeles County Traffic Improvement Plan.

Thankfully, the 11 victims of a car and knife attack on Monday at Ohio State University are expected to survive. But while not the most deadly attack in recent memory, in many ways it presents a confluence of issues that President-elect Donald Trump must address immediately.

A year after the San Bernardino terror attack, the healing process has barely begun for some victims and families. Dec. 2, 2015 is still too fresh in many hearts and minds. The community’s response, then and now, has been exemplary.

Petraeus in Foggy Bottom David Petraeus as secretary of state? You will recall that much of Donald Trump’s campaign was predicated on the notion that Hillary Clinton should go to jail for her sloppy handling of classified material.

Is aggressive panhandling out of hand in Old Pasadena? It’s hard to say if the practice has even become more prevalent in recent years. For decades, the sidewalks of the shopping and dining district centered around West Colorado Boulevard have been temporary homes to the homeless, or those who appear to be homeless, with their dogs and even cats, with their guitars and tip hats, with their handmade signs detailing their plight.

The California Supreme Court has agreed to hear a Northern California “pension spiking” case that has major implications for pension financing and reform efforts throughout the state, setting up a showdown over whether pensions may be reduced for existing government employees.

California is an expensive place to do business and will likely get even costlier for the foreseeable future. That’s the takeaway from the Kosmont-Rose Institute Cost of Doing Business Survey, an annual survey reviewing fees, taxes, costs and incentives that contribute to the cost of running a business.

And then there was one — one unreconstructed communist regime in the world. It’s hard to picture a more fitting symbol of capitalism’s triumph over communism than the death of Fidel Castro on Black Friday.

With the passing of Fidel Castro, American policy toward Cuba is back in the spotlight. The small island nation just 90 miles off of American shores has been ruled with an iron fist for over 50 years by Fidel and his brother Raul, who, in attempting to make real their visions of a communist society, have primarily succeeded in keeping Cubans poor and less free than most in Latin America.

Donald Trump is perhaps receiving more attention than any other U.S. president-elect in history. In particular, his vast wealth and empire are raising numerous questions from onlookers and opponents alike.

The Electoral College system for choosing presidents has been controversial since the nation’s founding, but never more than now and nowhere more than in California. Donald Trump won the White House by prevailing in the Electoral College count even though Hillary Clinton got more votes across the nation and was the overwhelming choice in its biggest state.

Texas Congressman Jeb Hensarling is not a fan of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, the massive banking legislation passed in the wake of the financial crisis. He believes it has slowed the U.S. economy by burdening small banks and credit unions with costly regulations that have choked off lending to the small businesses which create most of the nation’s jobs.

The goal of eliminating pollution at the Los Angeles and Long Beach port complex is one that everybody applauds, but how to get there is proving to be challenging and not so unanimous. As one observer said, the devil is in the details.

Since its very founding, the United States of America has served as a beacon and exemplar of freedom in the world. But that mantle has been slipping in recent years, according to a Cato Institute analysis.

It turns out, as is so often the case, that when you look into the history, the stories behind Thanksgiving are more complicated than one might first imagine. But just because you can’t trace a straight line between grateful Pilgrim Fathers in Massachusetts and today’s orgy of overstuffed family members and pro football is no reason not to take advantage of the opportunity to be thankful for the blessings we have experienced over the past year.

A demographic analysis of Los Angeles County voting patterns on Measure M, the half-cent sales tax for transit, by staff writer Steve Scauzillo last week showed that its passage was secured by two large and important groups in the county: Latinos and millennials.

President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., to be attorney general of the United States rightly has proponents of marijuana legalization troubled. Sessions, who at an April congressional hearing remarked that “good people don’t smoke marijuana,” and joked in the past that he thought members of the Ku Klux Klan were “okay until I found out they smoked pot,” is a hard-line drug warrior at a time when most of the nation has signaled a willingness to permit marijuana use.

If Donald Trump lives up to his promises, he will be a very busy president as soon as he is sworn in to office on Jan. 20. On the campaign trail, Trump earned cheers for the many things he said he would do “on day one” — or at least in his first 100 days in the White House.

Southern California has a severe shortage of affordable housing. The best solution is to expand the supply of homes. But even people who know all of that might look out from where they live or work, see a crowded city or suburb and conclude there’s simply no open space in which to build.

Campaigning is one thing. Governing, especially at the presidential level is another. Some know this intuitively. Others learn in a hard school. Both major party presidential candidates this year came out against the complex trade pact called the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Officers in the largest police force in the San Gabriel Valley began using body cameras this week, well ahead of a former rollout schedule. And since citizen groups, police brass and officers themselves are all hopeful that being able to view video of complicated future incidents will help sort out confusion, everyone’s happy, right? Not so much on the citizen side, it turns out.

In an effort to combat the “runaway production” of film and television programs to other states offering tax incentives, California adopted a film credit in 2009. But such narrowly targeted tax breaks have costs, and the film credit has been more of a flop than a blockbuster.

On television, the presidency could easily be mistaken for a monarchy, with all the pomp of red carpets and motorcades. The truth is very different. The American system of government has a fire alarm in every corridor of power — and many opportunities to break the glass and knock down the blaze of an ill-advised policy.

Even after the success of the Measure M sales tax on the November ballot, speeding rail and bus-route construction throughout Los Angeles County, Metro is still going to have what transit experts call the last-mile problem.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society,” wrote Edward Bernays, regarded as the “father of public relations,” in his influential 1928 book, “Propaganda.

In the aftermath of the residential election, many Californians are feeling a little detached from the rest of the nation, and a group of state residents is saying we should make the separation official.

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the guns that began to roar in August 1914 finally fell silent. The Great War, which took the lives of some 17 million people, including more than 116,000 Americans, was over.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this editorial misstated the result of the election for California state senator in the 29th District. Ling Ling Chang won a close contest. Tuesday’s election in the communities of the San Gabriel Valley and Whittier area bore almost no resemblance to the election in the nation at large.

Our Question of the Week for readers after the 2016 election is simple: What now? What does Donald Trump’s election as the 45th president mean for America going forward? Many Americans have worried that after a bitter contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton, the voters’ verdict would do little to settle the nation’s sharp divisions.

With just less than 10 percent of the votes in — absentees, plus a smattering of precincts — late Tuesday night, Los Angeles County voters were in a mood to continue an existing property-tax support for local parks, and to add a half cent per dollar to the sales tax to support a faster build-up of the rapid transit system.

Would you like to know what Bill Clinton discussed with Attorney General Loretta Lynch during their unscheduled secret meeting aboard her private plane on the tarmac at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix on June 27? You’re not alone.

Unless they pay attention to the fine print on their utility bills, where one line item for decades has been an undergrounding fund to the tune of about $11 a month per household, many Pasadenans had not been aware of the effort to bring power lines down from their unsightly poles until the embezzlement scandal hit.

This might be a good time to dust off the old adage that all politics is local. Looking at the national campaign, many Americans probably wish it were literally true. In Southern California, some people may skip not only the election for president on Tuesday.